The Manager Track

When Your Direct Report Has More Experience Than You Do (Ep 332)

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Vocal Fry, Upspeak, and Nerves: The Habits That Undercut Your Presence - with Kathryn Janicek (Ep 331)

When a senior leader handles a hard question at an all-hands and makes it look easy, it's natural to assume they were born comfortable in front of a room and you weren't.

Written Presence: What Your Slack Messages Say About How Senior You Are (Ep 330)

The perception of how senior you are gets built in rooms you are not in, using text you wrote in about forty seconds. A skip level reads three of your Slack messages. A

Stop Overexplaining at Work: The Three-Beat Answer (Ep 329)

You give a good answer. Clear, accurate, done in one sentence. Then you keep going. You add the context, the caveat, the option you considered and did not pick. All of i

The Update Trap: Why Good Status Updates Cost You Authority (Ep. 328)

You have done it a hundred times. Someone senior asks where things stand, and you give them the full picture: every work stream accounted for, clear timelines, nothing mi

Resistance to Coaching: What Leaders Area Really Protecting (Ep 327)

Most resistance to growth never announces itself. It shows up as a calendar that will not cooperate, a quarter that is too full, a leadership program that would be a bett

Giving Feedback as a Manager: The 3-Conversation Method (Ep 326)

Someone on your team does something you do not like. It is small, so you let it go. It happens again a few weeks later, and you let that one go too. By the third time, yo

How to Write a Leadership Philosophy (Ep 325)

Sometime in the next few months, a decision will land on your desk that makes half the room unhappy. It will show up on an ordinary Tuesday, in a week that was already fu

Managing Former Peers? Have These 4 Conversations First (Ep 324)

Six months ago you sat next to these people. You complained about leadership together, covered for each other when something slipped, and knew exactly what got said in th

Am I Ready to Be a Manager? The Four-Question Audit (Ep 323)

Somewhere along the way, you picked up the idea that thoughtful ICs wait until they’re ready before going for the manager role. So you keep asking the question. Am I read

How to Read the Room: The 3 Questions Intuitive Leaders Ask (Ep 322)

You walk into a meeting with senior people, and within seconds the internal questions start: Should I speak early or wait until I’m asked? Am I reading the mood right, or

From Doer to Leader: Redefining Competence in Your New Role (Ep 321)

There is a thought a lot of managers carry around and almost never say out loud: “Honestly, my direct report is a stronger performer than I am.” If you have had some ver

Why You Keep Handing Away Credit You Earned (Ep 320)

There is a small flinch that happens when someone hands a high performer a compliment. A pause. A quiet thought of “I wonder if they really mean it,” followed by a fast h

Stop Doing Your Team's Work: The Over-Functioning Manager Trap (Ep 319)

It usually shows up disguised as one of your strengths. You are the manager who notices the gap before anyone else does and quietly fills it. The deck gets polished, th

The Great Flattening: How to Lead a Team That Doubled Overnight (Ep 318)

You used to manage six people. Then a reorg, a hiring freeze, or a quiet round of cuts took out the layer above you, and now you are managing twelve. Same hours in the da

Leading an Inherited Team: The First 90 Days (Ep 317)

You walk in on day one and the team is already a fully formed thing. They have inside jokes you don't get, a process you didn't design, and a read on you that started for

AI in the Workplace: The Problem No One Names - With David Dean (Ep 316)

In this episode, Ramona sits down with David Dean, a technologist with close to two decades inside complex organizations and the author of a new book, An Inbox Between Us

The 5 Mental Models New Managers Should Borrow from Charlie Munger (Ep 315)

Most leadership advice tells you what to think. Be more decisive, be more empathetic, give better feedback, and so on. Charlie Munger spent his life paying attention to t

Letting Go of Control: Why Your Best Intentions Are Stifling Your Team (with Glen Galaich) (E 314)

Here is something most managers do not realize about themselves. The way you respond when someone gives you feedback is the clearest signal of how much control you are q

Why Your One-on-Ones Turned Into Status Meetings (And How to Fix It) (Ep 313)

You schedule the one-on-ones. You show up. You take notes. You walk out feeling like a good manager, and your direct report walks out without having mentioned the thing t